Lowering the mast

While we have had several sailboats before I've never really been comfortable when it comes to lowering a mast and have always relied on the boat yard for help. Historically they promised a lot and generally disappointed in this area. My experience has been that they will generally operate the crane for you while you do all the work. This time may work out to be the exception?

The yard called in the crane company. Helped get everything disconnected. I'm a bit worried about getting all the wires that were running through the mast connected again when we get to our destination but that's a problem for later. For now they are labeled showing what connects to what so I can join wire 1 to the other part of wire 1 at some point in the future. Needless to say there were a lot of wires and no easy disconnects. Fortunately we only ended up cutting one wire that we could not trace. It will be interesting to see what it might have been and how many smaller wires are in it when the time comes to join it back together.

The crane showed up around 1130 on a day that was 89 degrees and very humid. Luckily the yard treated this event as an all hands on deck maneuver from a staffing standpoint I think I had 5 guys plus the crane operator for this project. Getting it off proved to be pretty easy. Unfortunately the yard had not got around to making the braces/brackets they had committed to prior to lowering the mast so there was nothing to lay the mast in on the boat once it was removed. They ended up moving it over and setting it on some blocks on land. At this point everyone took a break and started scratching their heads on next steps. I realized there were also no straps to tie it down and asked Amy to make the 35 minute drive to the hardware store to buy everything they had in the racket strap section.

Meanwhile the yard guys found a spreader bar to help balance the mast as it would be moved over the boat. They had also decided to use some of the blocks they set boats on to temporarily rest the mast on my boat with. Unfortunately these were to be stacked on each other until the actual supports could be made. The new plan was to later use their smaller crane to raise it on deck enough to get the promised supports under it the next day. I was not very excited about this idea but unfortunately it seemed like a reasonable approach for what we could do at this moment and I was not very excited about paying the crane guy to sit around any longer then we had to or worse yet come back the next day.

Now that some informal plans were made up it was time to set the mast onto the boat. Unfortunately because of the way our mast is rigged to rake back there is some diamond shaped rigging starting midway up the mast that makes that happen. This rigging seemed to be hitting our bimini top and limited how far we could push the mast towards the back of the boat making it hang over the front of the boat about 15ft. It seemed we had a few options:

1. We could disconnect it which would allow us to push the mast back further and better balance the boat but would require a rigger when we put it up somewhere that understands our boat, why it was shaped that way, and knows how to get it back to that shape for optimal performance. This did not sound like a great idea as a good rigger can be hard to come by.
2. We could raise the mast up higher on deck (about 3-4ft) to ensure the cable would clear our bimini but then we might be to high to make it under the lowest bridge along the canal. 
3. We could take the top and windshield down which would provide zero protection from the elements during the 2000 mile journey and possibly make our helm position very uncomfortable. 

4. 

   A problem waiting to happen

   We could let the mast hang over the front of the boat more than we would like which would somewhat limit our travel days on the Atlantic and Great Lakes to ideal weather only. 

In my mind all of those options sucked. I looked over to my left and started looking at the straps on the travel lift and decided to just get the mast on deck for now and hopefully we could use the travel lift to bring it back up to change the mast position vs being limited to their crane. Hopefully once they get some chalks made to hold the mast more appropriately we might be able to have a better idea of where our height cut off will officially be and with some creative engineering we may be able to move the mast back and keep our top and window protection. For the moment I'm pretty sure we can make it under the 20ft bridge but I would really like the option of making it under the 15ft bridge.

Some other fun challenges I have not mentioned yet. 

1. We decided to do all of this work while the boat is still on the Chesapeake Bay. It seemed like a good idea at the time as the yard we were at was willing to do the work and their labor rates are quite fair compared to doing this somewhere in NY. This means we will have to travel up the Bay, though the C&D canal, then down to Cape May, and then 18hrs up the East Coast in the Atlantic with our mast down before we get to the Hudson River where the conditions will start to become easier weather/element wise about 1/3 the way up.
2. We found out our mast is really 69ft long. This means we are now a 69ft boat which will make docking interesting, limiting, and expensive anywhere we stop. It also means a best case setup we will have 10ft of mast hanging over each end of our boat.
3. 
   Turns out there is no where in Buffalo, NY (the end of the Erie Canal) that can put a mast that big up on a catamaran. Luckily I found a place in Oswego, NY that can which is where we will come out if we go the Lake Ontario route.

Our current thoughts are that we would like to leave the mast down until we get to where we will have the boat hauled out on Lake Michigan. This will allow us to do some maintenance on the mast next spring. Items like cleaning up some of the rusted fittings so we can hopefully see where the rust is coming from, replacing the tricolor light that worked but had water in it, replacing some of the stainless bits on the roller furling that are showing their age, etc. Additionally if we leave the mast down there is a chance we might be able to get the boat into inside storage for the winter which would hopefully be easier on the boat as it seemed our gel coat did not appreciate all the freezing and melting last winter even though the boat was shrink wrapped. So lots of items to work though as we make this journey at the end of the month. But for now the big dependency we have is the yard getting the chalks made and placed under the mast then ensuring its tied down well enough to make this trip prior to August 25th when we get back to the boat. Any wagers if it will happen before we get there?